With continuous development in recent years, Indonesia has become the largest economy in Southeast Asia, and more and more domestic e-commerce players are selling their goods to Indonesia through e-commerce platforms. Behind the prosperity of cross-border e-commerce, overseas warehouses have also developed rapidly.
Overseas warehouses are warehousing and logistics nodes established by cross-border e-commerce export sellers in foreign areas close to buyers in order to improve their order delivery capabilities. They usually have functions such as overseas cargo storage, circulation processing, dropshipping, and after-sales services. It is a very important link in cross-border e-commerce transactions, and it is also the most difficult link for merchants to control.
Advantages of overseas warehouses
Reduce logistics costs
The logistics cost of transporting bulk goods to overseas warehouses in Indonesia and then delivering them according to orders is much lower than shipping small packages from China to Indonesia.
Speed up logistics timeliness
Shipping goods from overseas warehouses can save the time spent on customs declaration and clearance. It not only greatly shortens the transportation time and speeds up the timeliness of logistics, but also avoids many risks from Indonesian customs.
Increase product exposure
The shopping habits of Indonesian consumers mean that when choosing products, they often give priority to local delivery. When using overseas warehouses, you can change the shipping address to local delivery in Indonesia.
increasing customer satisfaction
Problems such as damaged goods, incorrect shipments, or leakage of goods may occur during transportation, and customers may request returns, exchanges, or reshipments.
If the goods are shipped from China, the logistics cost will most likely exceed the value of the goods, causing great losses to the merchants; and if you choose to ship from an overseas warehouse, the cabin can be adjusted by itself. Even if the goods are returned or exchanged, not only the logistics cost Losses are reduced and the customer’s delivery time is also shortened.
Overseas warehouse type
Currently, the three common types of overseas warehouses in Indonesia are: self-built overseas warehouses, leased overseas warehouses (third-party overseas warehouses), and platform overseas warehouses.
Self-built overseas warehouse
For example, JD.com has set up its own JD.com overseas warehouse in Indonesia.
The advantage of building a self-built overseas warehouse is that merchants can control and manage it themselves, which is more flexible. However, merchants need to manage warehouses, customs clearance, logistics and other issues by themselves.
In a word, if you use a self-built overseas warehouse, it will be managed by your own people inside and outside, which not only requires a lot of labor costs, but also bears greater risks. Therefore, self-built overseas warehouses are generally built by leading e-commerce players.
Rental overseas warehouse (third-party overseas warehouse)
Such overseas warehouses are generally warehousing facilities built overseas by domestic companies, mainly targeting small and medium-sized cross-border e-commerce companies.
This kind of overseas warehouse will have stronger service and higher flexibility, which will be more conducive to merchants to expand sales categories, and also facilitate merchants to deal with accumulated inventory, adjust sales strategies, etc.
Third-party overseas warehouses can generally provide merchants with integrated overseas services such as head-haul services and local warehousing and distribution.
For example, Indonesia Tong Overseas Warehouse can receive orders at the same time with multiple mainstream e-commerce platforms in Indonesia, seamlessly connect OMS, WMS, and TMS multi-platform data management, and order information can be synchronized in real time to automatically collect product attributes, RF shelving, and picking, with high accuracy. 99.9% ABC intelligent storage, product validity period management, product serial number management, touch inventory, cycle inventory, intelligent wave management of planned replenishment, product out-of-warehouse verification, review packaging, effectively avoiding over-, under-, and wrong shipments, accuracy More than 98.5%.
Platform overseas warehouse
This kind of overseas warehouse is a service provided by cross-border e-commerce platforms for cross-border buyers. Our more common platform warehouses include Amazon's FBA warehouse, Shopee warehouse and Lazada warehouse.
E-commerce platforms will provide merchants with many preferential policies, such as improving the ranking of merchant products on the platform and giving them more exposure traffic. However, the platform's overseas warehouses do not provide customs clearance services, and sellers need to clear customs and deliver to the platform's overseas warehouses themselves. Moreover, the platform’s overseas warehouses all have a common feature: high fees, strict requirements for product warehousing, poor flexibility, etc.
Cross-border e-commerce is more suitable
What kind of overseas warehouse
Today in Indonesia, most cross-border e-commerce players choose third-party overseas warehouses, but we cannot blindly follow them. What we need to know is: the best overseas warehouse may not be suitable for you, but the best overseas warehouse that suits you must be the best overseas warehouse.
Although the three types of overseas warehouses are in a competitive relationship to a certain extent, if we look into it from another aspect, they can also be complementary to each other.
We can put a small amount of products into the platform warehouse and obtain the product ranking provided by the platform; we can use third-party overseas warehouses as backup warehouses to reduce platform restrictions and costs.
Therefore, when cross-border e-commerce merchants choose the type of overseas warehouse, they should not only consider the cost issue, but also need to consider the benefits brought by choosing this overseas warehouse. Sometimes 1+1 can be greater than 2.
